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In the summer of 1993, it wasn’t entirely clear that Ralph Klein’s experiment in drastic spending cuts would meet voter approval, particularly in the Tory’s bedrock of rural Alberta.

He, his treasurer Jim Dinning and their cabinet colleagues were, for instance, closing several old hospitals in small towns.

Just months before, rural Albertans had voted overwhelmingly for Klein’s promise of “drastic cuts” to public spending.

After seven years of Don Getty’s free-spending administration, the province was $30-billion in debt and adding to that total by nearly $4 billion a year.

Its per capita spending was more than a third higher than Ottawa’s.

Rural Alberta voters knew something had to be done, so they elected Klein, who was then the new Tory leader. But they hadn’t expected that the “something” might include their local eight-bed hospital.

The cuts, which most rural voters had thought would be distant and abstract, were hitting home. There were rumblings in the heartland.

So Ralph ­— as lots of Albertans referred to him and as he liked to be known — grabbed his wife, an assistant and a cellphone the size of shoebox and took off in an RV for a whistle-stop tour of places most Albertans couldn’t point to on a map.

They’d pull up in Vulcan or Olds or Fort Saskatchewan and out Ralph would pop. He’d stride into the main-street coffee shop or tiny local mall or cattle auction and explain the reasoning behind his government’s fiscal plan face-to-face, one concerned voter at a time.

A decade before, Brian Mulroney’s efforts to scale back federal spending — which on a percentage basis were much smaller than Klein’s — were derailed by one angry granny confronting him over pensions as he alighted from his limousine on Parliament Hill.

But here was Klein wading into the jaws of the beast, inviting angry voters to poke him in the chest, then patiently responding to every complaint and concern.

When his tour was over, his government enjoyed the highest approval ratings it would ever witness. Such was the extent of Klein’s charm and common touch.

To put the Klein revolution — the Alberta Advantage, as he dubbed it — into perspective, contrast what he and his government accomplished with the Common Sense Revolution in Ontario at roughly the same time.

Ontarians who disliked the government of Mike Harris still talk about his two terms as if they were the Dark Ages. But the Harris Tories cut public spending by just under 4%. Klein and his government cut it by over 18%.

In the budget they inherited from Getty in 1992, spending was at $17.7 billion.

By the end of their first term in 1997, it was down to $14.4 billion.

And by the time Klein left office in 2006, the $30-billion accumulated debt he had inherited was also gone.

It’s true Klein had the good fortune to govern during a time of uninterrupted prosperity.

But it is not the habit of politicians who govern in good times to rein in government spending.

They usually forget their promises to get the books in order as soon as the cash starts flowing in.

There is also no doubt that Klein fell prey to this habit in his final two terms. It became easier to throw cash at noisy interest groups, such as public workers, than to outsmart them with clever PR the way he had in his first two terms. It would have taken more energy than he had to continue his early fights.